Updating the voting rights act

Tuesday

Jun 25, 2013 at 11:10 AM

I haven’t read the full opinion and dissents on today’s Supreme Court voting rights decision, nor do I understand fully what it means to keep Section 5 intact while throwing out Section 4. The divisions on the court and among those reacting to it have been predictable.

I find myself more ambivalent. There are still threats to voting rights through the actions of state legislatures, but they are just as likely to come from states that aren’t required to “preclear” election law changes with the DOJ as from states punished by the VRA for the sins of the Jim Crow era. Maybe someone can explain to me why it still makes sense to have different rules for different states, and what it would take to give the feds adequate authority to challenge discriminatory voting laws regardless of which states enact them.

Rick Holmes

I haven’t read the full opinion and dissents on today’s Supreme Court voting rights decision, nor do I understand fully what it means to keep Section 5 intact while throwing out Section 4. The divisions on the court and among those reacting to it have been predictable.

I find myself more ambivalent. There are still threats to voting rights through the actions of state legislatures, but they are just as likely to come from states that aren’t required to “preclear” election law changes with the DOJ as from states punished by the VRA for the sins of the Jim Crow era. Maybe someone can explain to me why it still makes sense to have different rules for different states, and what it would take to give the feds adequate authority to challenge discriminatory voting laws regardless of which states enact them.